It’s a familiar feeling to anyone who has found themselves trapped in an endless cycle internet browsing- somewhere, out there, is the article, text or information that’s going to make sense of it all and make something click, as it were. My new year’s resolution for the second year running- having finally managed to quit smoking- was to stop wasting time in this manner, along with the even more pointless activity of reading the comment boards of blogs. Amongst many others, this topic was covered during a workshop at the ICA lead by Mark Fisher and Nina Power addressing the way the internet has affected the dissemination of artworks and looking at how artists and writers have used the web, especially blogging.
More of an informal dialogue with comments and questions actively encouraged throughout, the talk took in themes like the continuous displaced attention typical of the web, the illusion of infinite time it conjures up and the politics behind a switched-on culture. Thankfully free of the usual tips to success, networking and branding that often characterize ‘artists and websites’ discussions, the speakers instead talked about the personal reasons behind starting a blog in the first place and the strangeness of suddenly addressing a public- even if no one is reading. Mark asserted, and Nina concurred, that for him and others of his acquaintance, starting a blog coincided with some sort of loss or otherwise difficult period, in his case depression following the ending of his PhD. It takes some guts to offer up this kind of detail to a crowd of strangers, and it set the tone for an almost intimate (in a good way) discussion.
The tension between the printed word and on screen text was another theme, since most people prefer to read long articles in book form; on screen, with other tabs constantly attracting your attention, the pull to keep scanning and moving to the next article is too strong. This continuous displaced attention, a kind of distracted roving in which the ‘labour is the look’ and eye-balling accrues value, is apparently integral to what Jodi Dean called “communicative capitalism”. As I understand it, the utopian dream of increased quantity of and access to information does not lead to a more democratic situation, but to a state of confusion and distrust, where the endless stream of publicity, op-eds, wikipedia entries and blogs “produce searching, suspicious subjects ever clicking for more information, ever drawn to uncover the secret and find out for themselves”. The excess and lack of meaning creates a kind of whirlpool intensity of information, which the subject gets swept up in, unable to decide who to trust.
Not to mention the fact that despite the liveliness of online debate, the endless ‘Support this or that protest’ Facebook group thousands join, there is little actual, real-world activism to back it up. I started writing this before the uprising in Egypt, and I wonder how much events there disprove this theory- some have suggested that its precisely the Wikileaks episode which lead to the uprooting of the Tunisian regime, which consequently spurred on the Egyptian people into action. Mubarak’s decision to disable the internet suggests there is real fear from authoritarian regimes of protestors using it to communicate and organize; it undeniably also presents us, the online observers, with a captivating ‘breaking news’ drama to keep abreast of and endless debate to engage in.
Mark mentioned the crucial role of debate to culture as well, since the debate- the buzz, hype, discussion around it, the participation of the viewer- is the product; that’s what is being produced (and guarantees its success). This is obviously integral to reality TV, a pseudo-participation better described as interpassive rather than interactive, and as he said, with the whole ethos of ‘inclusion’ as practiced by the government and corporate interests. I’ve seen this ‘Have Your Say’, ‘Join the debate’ culture in action in Redbridge where I live: posters saying “£3 million must be cut, have your say where from” but the decision to cut at all, is of course, closed to debate. As Mark said, if your opinion made a difference, they wouldn’t want to know it!
